WebProNews

Amazon.com is a decent place to shop for books, CDs, or whatever else you like.  It's also a good site to read reviews, even if you do your buying elsewhere.  But the company has once again embarrassed itself by receiving an obvious patent.

To be fair, there was a good deal of separation between the original filing and the completion of its request; Amazon filled out all the paperwork on August 5, 2003, and only received the patent yesterday.  Also, as far as we know, no string of lawsuits has been filed as a result.

We'll let you look at the patent abstract (hat tip to Slashdot) and judge its validity for yourself, however.

So it's more or less a way of directing users from nonworking Web pages to similar functional ones.  Clever, but not as original as we'd like.  Also, it seems to depend on letting Amazon crawl around inside one's computer.

This is hardly the first instance of Amazon-related patent craziness, though; past instances include its patent on one-click shopping and another one covering the inclusion of search strings in URLs.